Time to review the third of the Musketeers. First, we had Kubuntian, then Ubuntos, and now Xubuntis. Sorry for
the lame names, I tried to make them kind of in line with the originals. Never mind. Now, this implies there's
a fourth player, too, maybe.

Anyhow, so far this bright autumn, at least in the northern hemisphere, Kubuntu Saucy was good, but not as good as its spring
predecessor. On the other hand, after a year of failed efforts, Ubuntu Salamander finally made it as a jolly good operating system. Which begs the question: how will Xubuntu 13.10
behave?

Live session & installation

Xubuntu has come a long way from being a boring, uninspiring operating system sulking in the shadows of Gnome
and KDE. But it can do more to enliven its image. For example, the splash screen features the nice blue bird
and lake and trees motif used in the previous release, but the
desktop comes with a gradiented wallpaper that is only a fraction exciting as the splash. Why? Is this not the
fruit of your loin or suchlike? Be proud.

One weird thing you will notice right there is that it shows the volume to be muted, but it's not. It's working
just fine, and even the laptop Fn keys work properly. Might be a live
session thingie. Speaking of work and proper, everything was dandy. Wireless, Bluetooth, Samba sharing, and
more besides. The only problem is, there's really no fun, at all. You don't get any pr0n codecs, so you can't
go about the Web enjoying music and videos.

Which means, at this point, I hit that Install Xubuntu icon. There's little else to do, really. Again, if
you've followed my Ubuntu family reviews for the past half a decade, little has changed. Sort your partitions
and move on. Salamander comes with a familiar slide show that tells you all about Xubuntu, with focus on Xfce
and how it does things, and once again, there can be more fire, more pride.

Now the fun begineth

All right, let's do the really interesting stuff. Make this distro rock as it should. We have a laptop with an
Nvidia card, so this is something we will definitely take into consideration. Overall, Xubuntu has avoided the
woes that its parent had with the drivers installation, but we still
must be cautious. And there's a lot more besides. Now, focus.

Basic pimpology

We have discussed a lot in the past, how to make Xubuntu presentable. This
time, I did a few very simple and familiar tricks. Grab an awesome wallpaper from wallbase.cc, and this is my only resources for the images, for those asking. Remove the
external volume icons from the desktop, make the bottom panel always visible, install the Faenza icon set.
Bob's your uncle, really. That's all it takes to transform a shy, average-looking distro into a fine specimen.
Why not do it by default, me wonders.

Nvidia setup

I won't tease you too much. The configuration of the Nvidia 319 driver went without any problems. Whether you
launch the Additional Drivers utility from the Settings menu, or go through the Software Center, you will reach
the same tool. Select the desired driver, apply, wait, reboot, enjoy yourself.

Applications - Sixes and Sevens

Xubuntu comes with a solid, if slightly underwhelming set. First, there are a ton of great applications for non-KDE and non-Gnome desktops. Not all are
included, and certainly not all the best ones. Furthermore, there are some unnecessary ones that can be tossed
away and replaced by worthier candidates.

Let's talk about Thunar first. It's become one kickass file manager. It has tabs, and for all those who had
problems keeping bookmarks between logins, especially Samba shares, worry no more. So what's the point in
having Gigolo still?

On the bright side, we have the mighty Firefox and Thunderbird combo, and the funky duo of Abiword and
Gnumeric, plus Pidgin, Transmission, and curiously GIMP. More goodies, plus some
less known, less needed apps. Can be optimized a little more. If you ask me, and you damn should, then get rid
of some unneeded extras and toss in a real office suite, that would be quite charming.

Multimedia - blimey!

Everything worked fine, including Flash, MP3 and even HD video packaged as WebM. Interestingly, Xubuntu
chose to open the file in Firefox, by default, but Parole did a very good job handling it, too. Underneath, we
have XviD and Lame, by the way. Still rather nice.

And I remain being impressed by the gmusicbrowser and how it manages to change its skin to mimic other players,
giving you an application with a dozen colorful personas, and truly extending your multimedia experience.

Resource usage - strewth!

Here, we set another new record. Even better than CentOS. Xubuntu 13.10
tolls only 280MB of memory on idle, and the CPU consumption hovers near 1%. This is probably the quietest
distro I've ever tried. More than that, application launches are instantaneous, even though we have a fairly
slow hard disk. The only program that might take a while coming up is GIMP, and that's only because it has to
load all its plugins the first time.

Printing

Works fine. Samba shares browsable. Tickity-Boo.

Extra fun

How about Steam? Sounds like a good idea. It's there in the
repo, and you don't need any special instructions to get it
running. Just search for it, select, login to Ubuntu One for your free purchase, and complete the installation.

Gordon Bennett AKA problems

So what were they? Well, two. One, the sound problem remains. It's not a problem, but the indicator is useless.
It provides no useful info, the audio works, the volume controls work, and changing the icon set translates the
indicator into a kind of a traffic prohibition sign. So I felt it necessary to remove it. No ill side effects.

The second issue relates to system stability. The thing is, apart from a one-time glitch, and we shall soon
elaborate, the system was rock stable. No system errors, application errors, or anything alike. Suspend and
resume worked fine. Except that the first time I did it, I got a kernel oops. No such issues afterwards, but we
still must count this one exception, because the review would be incomplete without it.

Conclusion

Remember Fuduntu? Well, this Xubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander comes as
close as being perfect as that. It has everything you need, grace, beauty, amazing speed and minimal resource
usage, a great balance between functionality, practicality and bling-bling, and it's extremely stable.
Everything worked majestically, including the installation, the Nvidia drivers setup, the multimedia stack,
apps, games, printing, and so forth.

Except two tiny issues. Of course. There must always be some. Otherwise, what's the point? So we have the
volume icon that doesn't do much good, but at least it causes no evil. And the system couldn't recover well
from its sleep the first time. This has not happened to me with the other two distros, but y'know how it works.
But still, even with these niggles that bar the perfect score, Xubuntu Salamander is an awesome distribution.
Xubuntu keeps getting steadily better and better, and maybe it's high time to consider a commercial spin,
because the distro sure deserves it. Anyhow, grade wise, 9.99/10. Jolly fantastic.